A warp saved is a warp earned

Bryony is becoming more and more of a handful every day. More words (more mouthiness), more gestures, more facial expressions, more everything. She is also disgustingly cute. I am biased, I know, and I wish I was comfortable with the idea of posting my children’s pictures on the blog, but as the blog is public and I don’t know if predators read it, it’s much safer for the girls if I keep their pictures out of here instead of proving their cuteness. You, dear reader, will simply have to take my word for it that this child takes cute to a whole new level. I think it’s her dimples and big brown eyes.

We have a gate at the foot of the stairs leading into the playroom. Not for this child the typical pressure-mounted gate to block the doorway. No, this one nearly broke her neck proving she could climb those roughly a week after she started walking. That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, but not much of one! For her, we had to buy one of those expensive, screw-into-the-wall types of metal gates that swing open. In order to do this, you have to hold a switch on top of the gate in the forward position, while simultaneously lifting and swinging the gate open. It is a rutting pain in the neck when your hands are full, and I am in the normal mom quandary of wishing she was old enough not to need these stupid things anymore, and knowing that when the gate goes, babyhood is well and truly over, which, of course, I wish would last longer. Obviously, I can’t have it both ways.

Usually, you can let go of the gate and rest assured that it is going to shut itself, but lately, there are two problems with that:

1.- It doesn’t close itself all the way anymore. Bryony has hung on it and yanked on the bars so much that she has somehow warped it somewhere, so unless you physically close it yourself, you might as well not have it at all.

2.- Bryony, now that she is officially two, is faster, cannier, sneakier, and much more cunning. She waits for the forgetful parent to leave the gate to shut itself, and she is through it like lightning. True, she is not so fast that she can’t be caught…even I, with all my joint problems, can catch her at a quick walk. But you have to know she’s gone through it in order to catch her before she is entrenched under the dining table, her favorite hiding place. She has learned to keep her giggles to herself until she is well and truly out of the play area.

Today, she tried something entirely new for her repertoire. She dragged a toy box to the gate.

Granted, she’s been dragging toy boxes around the playroom for months, so that, in itself, is nothing new. What is new is that she finally made the connection between the fact that the gate is much taller than she is and how standing on something could reduce that height difference. I am very thankful that her father caught her, and that we don’t have taller toy boxes! She is learning ingenuity, creativity, and above all, patience.

Done properly now!

I am also learning patience. Maybe I should say, I am re-learning patience. I think I mentioned the other day that I had warped Moya for card weaving. Well, everything I could possibly do wrong, I did. I had learned card weaving years ago at an SCA event, but it was one lesson and did not involve a loom. I have Candace Crockett’s book Card Weaving; did I sit down and review what I thought I knew first? No. I drafted a quick design, threaded the cards (which is the only thing I did properly), and tied the warp onto Moya. Then I started weaving. That was when I realized I should have been more patient and read the book again. First, I had the end of the warp tied to the upper rear peg, and the rest of it wound around the tension rod in the front, which, if I had intended to weave from back to front would have been fine, but that wasn’t my intent! The weaving was supposed to start at the tension bar in the front and go to the back. Then, I realized I was weaving through the wrong shed. The weft is supposed to go through the shed between the cards and your body. Think of the cards as the beater, and you’ll understand what I mean. I was using the shed behind the cards, so the weaving started in the middle of the warp and worked its way toward me. Last, the design I had drafted wasn’t appearing on the facing part of the band. On the back, there was a version of my draft, but it wasn’t correct.

The nice thing about card weaving is that it’s very forgiving. After doing what I should have done in the first place (reading the book again!), I unthreaded the weft, lifted the entire warp off, and re-did it properly! I now have the design on the facing where it should be, the entire weaving starts at the tension bar as it should, I’m using the proper shed, and everything is going beautifully! I definitely worked for–and earned!–that particular warp! Patience: lesson learned.